I suspect that part of my problem is that I am not a native english speaker but here it is. I have a table with column header labels. One of these columns contains the "number of messages received". Another, the "number of messages archived", etc. How should I label these columns ?

1 Answer
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I'd recommend going with the first, and placing the stress on the nouns. This is more natural for English speakers, from your name I suspect you might be French-speaking and inclined to reverse the order of adjectives and nouns?

For guidance, check out Google Images with some samples, you will see clearly the stress on nouns:

It's also the use of the participle - by placing it before the object the reader is looking instinctively for a subject. By placing the noun first, the missing subject does not cry out for attention in the same way.